


Things That Never Happened: Animal Instinct

by wheel_pen



Series: Alice [37]
Category: Smallville
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Kid Fic, Naughtiness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-03
Updated: 2013-05-03
Packaged: 2017-12-10 07:04:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/783204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wheel_pen/pseuds/wheel_pen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU of Alice series. Continuing the Kryptonian race is a biological imperative. No matter how ridiculous Clark and Alice’s family size gets. This story is unfinished.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Things That Never Happened: Animal Instinct

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Alice, my original female character, is new in Smallville. There is something special about her, and she and Clark form a relationship.
> 
> 2\. This series starts after the end of the second season—after the destruction of the spaceship and Clark abruptly leaving town.
> 
> 3\. Underage warning: This story may contain human or human-like teenagers, in high school, in sexual situations.
> 
> 4\. The bad words are censored. That’s just how I do things.
> 
> I hope you enjoy this AU. I own nothing and appreciate the chance to play in this universe.

            Somehow, even though Clark supersped through getting dressed in the mornings, he still managed to wander downstairs with barely enough time to grab breakfast before he had to run to school. This time, at least, he felt like he had a good excuse—his dreams last night had been so vivid, he was exhausted instead of rested when he finally woke up.

            “You okay, honey?” his mother asked absently from the stove, practically hurling a muffin onto the table for him. She had that mother’s instinct that could read him like a book—a large-print one.

            “I guess,” Clark answered lamely, picking at the pastry. He wasn’t even really that hungry, which was another unusual occurrence.

            “Didn’t you sleep well?” Martha continued. Somehow she managed to probe with great concern while at the same time making a perfect cheese and green pepper omelet.

            Clark shrugged, then realized she couldn’t see him with her back turned. “I dunno,” he replied. “I just—I had all these really weird dreams last night.”

            “What kind of weird dreams?” Jonathan swept into the kitchen with a crisp fall breeze. He tried to make his question sound casual, but Clark knew it for what it was: preliminary investigation into yet _another_ potential alien power. Clark felt slightly freakish and wished he’d just faked happy instead.

            “Oh, it was nothing, really,” he insisted, trying to perk up a bit. The muffin was in pieces on his plate, but he hadn’t actually eaten any. He glanced at the clock on the wall. “I gotta go. See you guys later.” He grabbed his bookbag and was out the door in a blur before they could respond.

            Weird dreams about... animals. Perhaps his parents had been expecting spaceships or vague prophecies of doom or something like that. But no, it was just... animals. Herds of animals, but not like cows or the other domesticated creatures commonly found in Smallville. These were wild animals, lions and wolves and bears and other fierce beasts with fur and claws and fangs, growling and snarling, fighting and running and hunting and, well, mating... He felt like he was running with them, all night long, so much so that he was surprised he actually woke up in his own bed when the alarm went off, with no bloody chicken feathers trailing away from the window.

            Actually, the weird animals dreams hadn’t just started last night—thinking back, Clark realized he’d been having them, on and off, for a couple weeks now, though last night was certainly the most intense. D—n Lex and his new high-definition TV, Clark decided. _That_ was probably the cause. Lex couldn’t resist an expensive piece of electronics, so of course he’d come home from Metropolis one weekend with a widescreen HD television set. And then it turned out, much to Lex’s utter disgust, that Smallville only received _three_ cable channels in high definition—one of which was Animal Planet. So Lex insisted Clark and Alice come over to the castle several times a week for the last month to watch—nature specials in high def. “Look at the fur on that hyena, you can almost see the individual strands of hair,” he’d say. “You can see the ticks on the wildebeest! Look at the sheen on that orca!” Lex was obsessed. And thus, Clark concluded, his current bout of animal-related dreams.

            Lex would find this extremely amusing. (But he wouldn’t change the channel.) Alice might get a big kick out of it, too, although Alice had been a little—touchy the past couple weeks, so he’d have to gauge her mood carefully this morning before telling her. Clark’s mom suggested it might be “a girl thing—that time of the month,” and after Alice confessed she had been feeling unusually “crampy,” burst into tears, and then crushed an old desk lamp stored in the barn with a large amount of vicious glee, Clark figured his mom was probably right. And that it was best not to ever mention it again.

            Suddenly Clark lurched to a stop in the middle of the Johnsons’ pasture, feeling dizzy. Great, just perfect. He tried to look around, to make sure that no one was witnessing what might very well be the blossoming of some new alien trait, like say a big blue tail or feathers. _Please, not feathers_ , Clark thought frantically, randomly, as the world became blurry around him. _Birds are unimportant. A true ruler of his territory must be a mammal, with fur..._

 

********

One month later

 

            “Mom, Dad... Alice and I are going to have a baby.”

 

*********

Two months after that

 

            “Mom, we just saw the sonogram... Yeah, looks healthy... all _three_ of them...”

 

*********

Eight years later

 

            It was that time of year again. Early fall—getting on to harvest, which meant that Clark spent most of his afternoons helping his father get the farm ready for picking, storing, and selling all the produce they’d been taking care of since spring. That way he could be in town around 3pm to pick the triplets up from the elementary school—judging by the frazzled first grade teachers that always met him at the door, the three young Kents had clearly taken over the place—and to pick Willie up from preschool. Clark was very glad they had recently made preschool all-day instead of half-day, and he could tell his mother was happy, too—no matter how much she enjoyed spending time with her grandchildren during the day, while Clark was working part-time at the _Daily Planet_ and Alice was managing the clothing store, Ella and Henry were _more_ than enough to keep her busy.

            Which was why it was so important that it was early fall again, and that Henry had been born the year before. The pattern was easily observable to even the most casual onlooker, once armed with a few details: the children’s birthdays were all in May or June, so they had all been conceived in September or October (eight months seemed to be the preferred gestation time, they had learned). Furthermore, the children were all two years apart in age (except for the triplets, of course). Meaning, that when a child was born in late spring one year, another was invariably conceived during the early autumn of the next year. Since this had now happened _four_ times without a break, Clark was fairly confident that it would indeed happen again—unless steps could be taken to prevent it.

            It wasn’t that he didn’t love his children. No, not at all. He loved every superstrong, superfast, never-sick, alien-invasion one of them. And it wasn’t that he didn’t love Alice. He was the first to admit that he felt his place in the universe was in her arms (and that was saying something, given that he had at one point traveled who-knew-how-many light years to get there). It was just that—in all his thoughts about what his future might hold, in all those “where I see myself in five years” essays he’d had to write for English class or Principal Reynolds, never did he imagine that at age twenty-six he’d have six children with his wife of eight years.

            Certainly he and Alice’s abilities gave them a distinct, almost unfair advantage over other teenage parents. They didn’t really need to sleep, or even eat for that matter, unless of course Alice was pregnant (which was admittedly frequently). They could work all day—Clark at the _Planet_ and the farm, Alice at her shop—and still have plenty of energy for evening classes at Metropolis U. And of course the “commute” between Metropolis and Smallville was, for them, only about five minutes.

            But money still wasn’t the easiest thing to come by. The children didn’t really have medical expenses, except for check-ups and the actual births, and Lex took care of all that because the doctor _and_ the clinic were under his supervision. But they _did_ need to eat and they _did_ need clothes and just a few toys and books and school supplies and diapers and toothbrushes and that kind of thing, and the farm’s resources had always been strained enough just supporting Clark and his parents. Clark’s internship at the _Planet_ was one of those jobs where your pay was the experiences you had and the contacts you made, in the hopes of landing a _better_ job there once you had a college degree. Alice pulled down a decent salary as manager of the clothing store, and she got a cut of any of her own designs that sold, but the salary was decent more for a _single_ young woman living and working in the city than for a mother of six on a farm. Of course Lex and Meg lavished food, toys, clothes, attention on the children every chance they got, but Clark had picked up some of his adoptive father’s pride and there was a limit to how much he could allow the Luthors to spend on _his_ offspring, especially with Liam and Livia to occupy themselves with.

            Besides which, there was just the... _image_ factor to contend with. Alice hadn’t been the only pregnant girl in her class in high school; in a small farming town unprotected sex was the teenagers’ favorite form of illicit entertainment, instead of gangs or drugs. But teen pregnancies still didn’t happen to Nice Kids, and while maybe that Wilson girl had been questionable, that Kent boy had always been Nice, so wasn’t it a shame that... If you _must_ be teenage parents, you could at _least_ get married, which Clark and Alice did, but then, you should really just _stop_ having children. You could have two, maybe three tops, and people would pretend they had forgotten you had the first one in high school and that you still lived at home with your parents and took night classes in crackpot subjects like textile design.

            Instead, Clark and Alice were utterly tasteless and just kept popping them out, like clockwork, every two years, and even among people who _knew_ them, who _knew_ that their biology was different from everyone else’s on the planet, there was the sense that they were _careless_ , that they didn’t _think_ , that they were _irresponsible_. And Clark hated that most of all. He used to think his sex life was nobody else’s business, but that was before his mom was babysitting the results of his sex life... And every year, with every new announcement, there were more questions about the kind of protection they used, the kind of techniques they tried. He remembered when his father tried to have the Man to Man Talk, the one that included a demonstration of a condom being applied to a broom handle, the one that was never comfortable but in this case was made all the more embarrassing by the fact that Clark was already a father of four by that point. He remembered Lex handing him a plastic cup and a stack of porn magazines, the glint in his eye just a little too mad-scientist bright, and explaining that he needed a “sample” so he could test spermicides on the little wriggling bundles of Kryptonian genetic information. That was after Clark had revealed he would soon be a father of _five_.

           Clark had long ago stopped pointing out another simple fact, which was that Alice never got pregnant at any _other_ time of year. He figured everyone who had involved themselves in this subject would be horrified to learn that most of the time, they didn’t even bother with condoms, let alone anything more complicated. But that was what they had learned: they could do anything, and everything, for twenty-two months out of a two-year cycle, be as careless and unthinking and irresponsible as any two teenagers could be, and nothing would come of it—embryo-wise, that is. But those two months, those alternate early autumns—they could take every precaution there was, until love-making became more of an expedition complete with specialized equipment, directions, and snacks, and somehow, somehow, the result was always the same.

            Jor-El, or rather the artificially intelligent embodiment of him lodged in the painted caves, was no help at all. Rather than explaining their alien biology in a way that might allow them to circumvent the reproductive results of an inordinately pleasurable experience—the way “mere” humans all over the globe had learned to do—he/it just smugly congratulated Clark for helping to revive a dying race. When Clark once angrily demanded which Kryptonians _his_ children were supposed to mate with, the program was, he felt, petulant in its silence.

            But this year, this time, it was going to be different. Oh, he and Alice were still going to have sex. Maybe when he was the father of _eight_ he’d get desperate enough to try abstaining altogether. But this time, for the months of September and October, they weren’t going to have _intercourse_. It was a sacrifice, of course, but only a temporary one, and hopefully one that would pay off in at least one calendar year during which Alice was _not_ pregnant. So the little fellas were going to be determined and chew hungrily through latex and polyurethane, swim blithely through spermicide, squeeze past diaphragms with a cackle of glee—let’s see them try and find that egg when they weren’t being allowed anywhere _close_ to their target. Clark thought of this as a war, and this year was the year he was going to outsmart his opponents.

            They made it through September all right. Grace and Owen, as usual, excelled at such first-grade activities as printing and addition, while Ava tried to content herself with her greater levels of creativity and imagination (just like her mother). Willie learned to con his older siblings into reading the same books to him over and over, until he had them memorized and claimed he could “read” them himself, at which point an argument would erupt. Ella swung wildly between imitating everything her mother did and being irrationally jealous of the time Alice spent with Clark. They were assured both of these practices were normal for a three-year-old. And Henry was beginning to take a perverse delight in doing exactly the opposite of what he was told. So perhaps, with all they had going on, not only at home but at school and on the farm and at work, neither of them noted the significance of certain unusual symptoms reappearing... like Alice’s greater physical discomfort and tenderness towards the middle of the month, or the increasing appearance of wildlife in Clark’s dreams. Really, no _ordinary_ person would attach much importance to such events.

            It was only when Clark found himself glancing around the crowded breakfast table one morning and thinking about how fine his _pack_ looked, how the older male had actually been useful instead of a threat to his dominance, how the older female had been quite valuable in looking after the cubs for his mate, that he really started to worry. This felt _far_ too familiar...

            Two weeks, two triple-strength steel doors, one concrete-lined subterranean cavern, and one padded room with a chunk of green Kryptonite in the corner and an unexpected weak point in the ventilation system later, and Clark and Alice were curled up contentedly on the sofa bed in the loft like old times, purring with the satisfaction of a job well done.

            Eight months, three bemused OB/GYNs, countless curses, one shopping spree courtesy Lex, and a number of heated discussions involving a baby name book later, and Iris, Leo, and Charlie Kent entered the world, and Clark just decided he had to give up the fight. The more he resisted, it seemed, the more determined his little fellas became, and as the father of _nine_ at age twenty-seven, he practically qualified for his own _country_ , if not yet his own _race_. Jor-El, or rather the artificially intelligent embodiment of him lodged in the caves, displayed an unseemly level of self-satisfaction.

 

*****************************

 

            Mealtimes at the Kent household tended to be loud, messy, and chaotic, with much shoving, bickering, and chattering and one or two firm voices giving orders above the din—but for people used to working on a farm, this was nothing new. Breakfast was the least peaceful of all, since everyone was scrambling to eat, dress, and acquire all the items they would need for school (and beyond), all before the bus arrived.

            Not too long ago, Clark and Alice had made a rare outing with all the children to see the remake of _Cheaper by the Dozen_ —much to the amusement of the townsfolk—and Alice came away quite satisfied that she had things more under control than the parents in the comedy. For example, far from using a sloppy morning assembly line pasting together unhygienic sandwiches to stuff into lunch boxes, Alice, Martha, and whichever two children whose turn it was made and packed all the lunches the evening _before_ , so that they were ready and waiting to be grabbed on the rush out the door. On the other hand, the complex scheduling of twelve individuals who frequently seemed incapable of keeping a thought in their heads for more than two minutes usually fell upon the mother, and Alice often found herself evoking Bonnie Hunt’s warm-hearted, dry-witted, calendar-wielding matriarch—especially at breakfast.

            “Ava, you have the newspaper meeting after school today,” Alice began loudly, her voice cutting through the cacophony of the nearby diners as she glanced at the heavily-marked schedule in front of her. “Willie, you have a trumpet lesson at 3:30, so take the bus to the high school and someone will pick both of you up when your sister is done.” Ava was listening, Alice knew, but likely Willie was not. Still, his trumpet case and music were sitting out on the counter next to his lunchbox, so she figured he might get the hint at some point during the day. “Ella, you have art class today at the library at 4, so after you get home from school someone will drive you back into town—“

            “Aw, Mom, can’t I just _walk_ to the library from school?” the eleven-year-old interrupted, making a face.

            “No, and why is that?” Alice asked rhetorically.

            The girl sighed. “Because the library is half a mile from the school and most people wouldn’t walk that far,” she recited in exasperation.

            “You got it. So you come home first.” All of the children, so far, appeared to be stronger and faster than other children their age, which was certainly helpful around the farm, but it also meant Clark and Alice had to be just as careful with them in public as _their_ parents had been with _them_. And that meant no unusual displays of speed or stamina—such as an eleven-year-old girl calmly walking half a mile to get to a class.

            “Iris, Leo, and Charlie, you have your swimming lesson at the castle tonight—“ A cheer went up from the seven-year-old triplets. “—so bring your suits to school with you, and get off the bus with Liam and Livia after school. Uncle Lex or Grandma Meg will probably drive you home, but do not, I repeat, _do not_ stay for dinner without _calling home_ first.” The Kents couldn’t risk the children participating in any sports activities at school—much to the children’s displeasure, on occasion—but swimming lessons had seemed like a practical activity to Alice. As far as she knew, none of the children could actually _drown_ —they could at worst sit on the bottom of the lake or pool, not breathing but not needing to, until someone retrieved them—but if they actually knew how to maneuver themselves in the water it would be easier to avoid such awkward situations.

            “And Martha?” Grandma Martha looked up from where she was “assisting” her youngest grandson with his oatmeal. “Bea, Fred, and Polly have their check-ups at the castle starting at 1pm today, so...”

            Martha smiled brightly and turned back to Fred. “Hear that, Freddy? We’re going to the castle today. Won’t that be fun?” Fred nodded eagerly, green eyes bright. Even though he was three years old, he hadn’t started speaking; Bea was all of five and barely put two words together. Since this was the same developmental pattern the other children had displayed, however—as well as Clark and Alice—and their vocabulary usually increased exponentially around the time they started kindergarten, the Kents had learned not to worry about this.

            With the appointment announcements over for the day, conversation—fragmented as it was—turned to other matters of importance that needed to be communicated before the family went their separate ways for the day. “Clark, I want to work on patching up that western fenceline today,” Jonathan began, swatting Charlie’s hand as he tried to sneak one of his sister’s sausage links. “What time do you think you’ll be home tonight?”

            Clark was spreading jelly on a piece of toast for Bea. “I’m not sure, Dad,” he replied apologetically, his hand blurring as he caught an errant glob of jam on the end of the table knife. “Lois and I have to finish up that big story about the charity auction today, so I might be late...” He swiveled in his chair, searching for two of his older children. “Grace, Owen, can you be home right after school to help your grandfather with the fence?”

            Predictably a duet of groans rose from that end of the table. “Dad, I was going to go to the Talon after school and, you know, _attempt_ to have a social life,” Grace protested, shoving the brothers on either side farther away with her elbows, presumably to keep them from jostling her carefully-arranged ensemble.

            “Well...” Clark was the first adult in the household to cave to almost any demand from his children, especially one evoking the social activities of “normal” kids.

            “That’s so _stupid_ ,” Owen countered forcefully, almost knocking over his glass of milk. “You hang out with your friends there _all the time_.”

            “Well what are _you_ doing that’s so much more important?” Grace demanded, blue eyes flashing at him.

            “ _I_ have to study for that history exam,” he replied smugly.

            “With... _Maya Johnson_?” Grace accused, watching her brother turn three shades of red and _completely_ knock over his glass of milk.

            Part of the table squealed unnecessarily loudly and leaped away from the spilled liquid, while the rest hooted and cat-called their oldest brother until he dropped his head to the table and covered it with his arms. “Shut up, shut up!”

            Alice tossed a dishrag at him. “Here, soak up that mess. Grace, be home right after school.” A huff of indignation. “Ava and Willie will be home around 4:30, Owen, absolutely _no_ later than 5:15.” Jonathan glanced at Clark with a raised eyebrow and a small smirk. Well, _that_ issue was taken care of.

            Clark glanced around the table, letting the sniping and teasing and questions and comments fall away until he just saw the huge, fractious but ultimately happy family he and Alice had somehow created. Well, not _somehow_ —he had rather vivid memories of how it had been created—but he never would have predicted that he’d ever be a father of _twelve_ , not to mention a reporter for the _Daily Planet_ and still an active participant on the family farm... All Clark could figure was that it was a good thing he didn’t actually need to sleep that much, because he needed twenty-six hours a day as it was to get everything done.

            Speaking of twelve—he counted the heads at the table twice more, glanced _under_ the table, turned to survey the whole room, focused his hearing on the bathrooms and the upstairs hallway, and finally came back to his original conclusion: there was one missing. He started going through them chronologically in his head: Grace, Owen, Ava, check. Willie, check. Ella, check. Henry—ah, no Henry.

            “Has anyone seen Henry this morning?” Clark called out, to no one in particular. A few _no’s_ greeted his question, and Henry himself did not appear to testify to his own existence, so Clark sighed and headed for the stairs. It never failed that there was _one_ child who overslept each morning, although usually it was Owen or Willie. Clark had decided that Kryptonian males just had a different circadian rhythm than the females, but since the females pretty much ran the place, the guys were left looking like they were late to everything. Predictably Alice had not been impressed with this theory.

            When Clark was growing up, the cheerful yellow farmhouse had had three bedrooms, all upstairs, and a bathroom on each floor. That was, of course, before the massive, and regular, family expansion. The first addition to the house had tacked a spacious master bedroom and bathroom on upstairs (for Martha and Jonathan, of course) as well as two smaller bedrooms downstairs, for a total of six. Plenty of room, they had thought, even for triplets. Then Willie arrived, and it was decided he would one day share a room with his brother while Grace and Ava split another. Then Ella had been born, and then Henry, and after that it appeared the pattern was set and would continue, possibly until the end of time, so a more extensive remodeling would be necessary.

            As a Christmas present Lex had hired an architect to come up with a plan that would provide the growing Kent family with all the room it might need, without turning the gracious farmhouse into a monstrosity of boxy additions. (Jonathan had grudgingly accepted the gift only after being assured that he and Clark could still do the bulk of the actual construction, if they wanted.) The result looked remarkably like the house Clark remembered from his childhood—just a few sizes bigger. The adults enjoyed larger bedrooms on the ground floor—Clark had started to worry about his parents climbing up and down the stairs all the time—while the children ruled the upstairs. Their bedrooms were small, granted, but everyone got their own, except for the same-sex pairs of the triplets. And the musty, uninsulated attic had been expanded and finished to give the older kids a “family room” to hang out in and the younger ones a larger playroom. Clark had jealously guarded his “Fortress of Solitude” in the loft of the barn, however, for those times when he—or more likely, he and Alice—just needed to get away for a little while, without actually going too far.

            Clark padded down the hallway towards the room set aside for his nine-year-old son. It was probably the smallest of them all, the result of a... misreading of the blueprints Lex had provided by Jonathan and Clark, who had solemnly sworn to never admit that to the other man. Also it was under the slope of the roof, so the ceiling was barely six feet high near the window—plenty high enough for Henry, at least at the moment, although Clark had to be careful when he was on that side of the room. But unfortunately that room seemed to be typical of Henry’s life—always getting the “fuzzy end of the lollipop,” as Alice phrased it. One huge advantage the Kents had over families was that the children were all quite healthy—there was no need to worry about the random cuts and bruises and diseases of childhood, which greatly simplified their lives. Henry, however, clearly stood out from his robust, tall siblings by being slender, almost skinny, and below the average height even for “normal” children, meaning he was barely taller than his five-year-old sister. Also, he was nearsighted in a house where only his grandmother and grandfather wore glasses, and then only for reading. Naturally his sisters and brothers were _quite_ aware of his differences and took almost every opportunity, it seemed, to point them out to him. Martha and Jonathan had assured their only child that this behavior was reasonably normal for siblings, but it still made Clark feel bad for the boy.

            He knocked gently on the door to the bedroom. “Henry? Come on, buddy, time to get up.” There was no answer, so he rapped a bit more forcefully, careful not to damage the wood. “Henry! Come on, get up, the bus will be here soon.” Again there was no answer, so Clark focused his x-ray vision and scanned the interior of the room. Yep, one small skeleton still curled up in bed. He sighed and pushed the door open, covering the space to the bed in just two strides. “Henry, come on, it’s late, you overslept.” A distressed groan was his reply, and Clark reached out to roll the boy over to face him. “Henry—“ The admonition died on his lips when he saw the child, and Clark quickly flicked the bedside lamp on for a better look.

            Henry’s normally pale face was flushed and damp, and Clark thought perhaps it was warm to the touch, although he couldn’t be sure. Blearily the boy opened his puffy eyes and mumbled, “I don’t feel good, Daddy.”

            Clark dropped to his knees beside the bed. “But you don’t get sick,” he reasoned, then felt foolish—obviously _that_ assumption wasn’t going to convince the boy to leap out of bed, healthy and full of energy. Instead he pushed the boy’s dark hair out of his eyes and asked, “You don’t feel good? What doesn’t feel good, buddy?”

            “My tummy hurts,” Henry admitted, “and I feel all hot and cold at the same time.” Then he _coughed_ , a wet, phlegmmy sound Clark hadn’t heard in the house since his father had gotten that nasty cold last winter. Henry snuffled loudly and, for lack of a better material, wiped his drippy nose on his pajama sleeve.

            Clark grimaced involuntarily and tried to remember that he was the parent and expected to witness, even handle, a lot of gross biological substances. Besides, where were they going to find Kleenex in _this_ house, except for his parents’ bedroom? At any rate, Clark was mystified by these symptoms, and worried as well—what if it was the same kind of meteor-dust-induced reaction that had floored him so many years ago, and sent Martha to the hospital?

            Well, when in doubt... turn to the mother. “You go back to sleep, okay, buddy?” he suggested, tucking the boy in more tightly. “Mommy’ll be up in a minute to check on you, okay?” Henry nodded sleepily and curled around his stuffed dog more tightly.

            Frowning, Clark left the bedroom and shut the door quietly behind himself, then thumped downstairs to the kitchen. Martha and Alice were engaged in dressing the younger children in weather-appropriate outerwear, however unnecessary it actually was for them, while the older ones frantically ran around grabbing shoes and lunch boxes and trumpet music and bookbags and all the other myriad items needed for a day in the grind of school. “...so if I could just go to Metropolis with them and go to the mall, I could pick up the new jeans I really _need_ , and I could get something for Ava or Ella or whatever, too,” Grace was bargaining as Alice attempted to stuff Leo’s wet-noodle arms into his jacket.

            Alice wasn’t falling for it, however. “And you would get the _money_ to go shopping in Metropolis from... all that cash you’ve been hoarding all year?” she asked dryly.

            Grace’s face fell. “But _Mom_ ,” she whined, “all my clothes are so _old_ , no one _else_ at school has all these patches in their clothes...” Clark winced and wondered if _he_ had ever sounded that way—a glance at Martha’s expression told him the teenager’s tone was, indeed, all too familiar.

            “We will talk about it _later_ ,” Alice deferred. “But get the _mall_ out of your head, it’s way overpriced.”

            “ _Mom_! I don’t want that stupid vintage stuff!” Grace protested, even as Martha heaped a coat, a bookbag that may or may not have been hers, and a lunchbox into her arms. “I’m tired of _other_ people’s old clothes they didn’t _want_! Why can’t I have something _new_?”

            “ _Later_ ,” Alice repeated, pushing her towards the door. “And be home right after school today, to work on the fence.”

            Clark suspected the fence was the object of some verbal abuse from his daughter as she flung herself out the door and down the front steps, but he imagined she would indeed be home at the appointed time and assisting her grandfather with the chore—however she might resent it, and her slave-driving parents, all day long. Clark _really_ couldn’t believe he had ever been like that.

            “Hey,” he said quietly, touching Alice’s arm. For a moment she gave him the task-master look of cool efficiency normally reserved for children bothering her when they should be running after the school bus, then she melted a little and switched to a special Clark-only smile. He started to smile back, then remembered why he actually needed to speak to her and frowned again. Clark pulled Alice aside and lowered his voice—for some reason he felt like this ought to be kept quiet. “Will you go up and check on Henry? I think he’s—sick.”

            Alice’s eyebrows shot up. “Sick?” she repeated, just as softly. Absently she patted the head of whatever child ran past shouting good-bye.

            Clark nodded. “He says his stomach hurts, and I think he has a fever. And he _coughed_.”

            Alice pursed her lips, trying to remember a time when any of the other children were ever sick, even as babies. Nothing came to mind, which worried her more. “Okay,” she replied after a moment, “I’ll go up and see him. You make sure they get on the bus, okay?”

            “Okay.” Clark hurried outside, counting the number of children waiting at the bus stop from the porch. Eight... it should be nine, of course, but that was counting Henry. In Clark’s opinion the entire schoolbus seemed to _sigh_ when it pulled to a stop at the end of the lane, as if it knew it couldn’t get out of taking on an unusually large number of new passengers—but wanted to anyway. Eight dark heads bobbed onto the bus as Clark watched, then the doors shut and the vehicle lumbered away.

            By the time Clark had picked up the morning paper and wandered back inside, Alice was standing in the kitchen again, consulting with Martha. “...maybe some light broth, if he can keep it down,” Clark’s mother was saying as he approached. “Some hot tea or juice—plenty of fluids, anyway.”

            Clark slipped his arm around Alice and she looked up at him with a frown. “He has a fever of a hundred and two,” she reported. Two degrees above normal, for them. “Coughing, upset stomach, muscle aches, chills...”

            “I’d say it was the flu, but...” Martha added with a shrug. Her grandchildren didn’t _get_ the flu. “Well, at least you’d better call the school and say he’ll be out today.”

            Clark nodded. “I can do that.” He glanced at Alice. “Um, I can call Perry and tell him I’ll be working from home today...”

            She raised an eyebrow. “Perry White is _not_ going to let you stay home with a sick child,” she pointed out, swatting his arm lightly. “I’ll call Marie and tell her she’ll have to run the shop on her own today.”

            “There is _no need_ for either of you to stay home today,” Martha contradicted them. “Jonathan and I will look after him, and I’ll take him over to the castle when the others have their check-up.”

            “Um, but Mom—“ Clark began to protest.

            “Clark, honey, both you and Alice can be here in about five minutes if anything happens,” Martha reminded him firmly, “and I will call you and let you know how he’s doing. So you two just hurry up and get to work, alright?”

            Clark looked at Alice and shrugged. Guess _that_ decision had been made.   


End file.
